Paige Birgfeld, 34, slain mother of three from Grand Junction, led a double life, also working for an escort service.

The soccer-mom/stripper murder investigation was a process of elimination and it took seven years.

Before the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department felt comfortable arresting Lester Ralph Jones in the death of Paige Birgfeld, they had to discount the possibility that many other men may have been culpable.

It was a time-consuming, meticulous process.

Key events happened along the way. The biggest was the discovery of Birgfeld’s remains by a hiker in the Wells Gulch area in Delta County on May 6, 2012.

But in the end what made the difference wasn’t new gotcha evidence like a fingerprint or a DNA link. The determining evidence was circumstantial and known by Mesa County Sheriff’s deputies since the beginning of the investigation.

“We believe at this point we have crossed off the list all the things we needed to do to make an arrest,” Mesa County Sheriff-elect Matt Lewis said in a news conference Friday. “There’s not a significant event as much as this is an exhaustive process we’ve been going through.”

Many of the clues that led to Jones’ arrest were known within days or weeks of Birgfeld’s disappearance on June 30, 2007.

When she vanished, Birgfeld was for many just a devoted mother holding down several different jobs to support her three young children and hold onto her upscale Grand Junction home. The twice-divorced Birgfeld sold Pampered Chef products and homemade baby slings from her home.

By day, the bubbly, friendly, outspoken woman was a doting mom, but by night she was a high-priced call girl who charged clients nearly $3,000 for a single evening. She had advertised in-call and out-call services under the alias of “Carrie” on a website called NaughtyNightlife.com and scheduled liaisons with other call girls.

Paige Birgfeld, 34, missing mother of three in Grand Junction, Co. lead a double-life, also working for an escort service.

The distinguished looking gentleman wearing a red leather sports jacket was standing shoulder to shoulder with me at the high-energy political event at a Denver lumber warehouse on March 1.

We were just below the raised platform where in a minute or two Republican Congressman Cory Gardner was expected to formally announce his candidacy against incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Udall for the U.S. Senate.

I didn’t feel very comfortable covering an important political event like this, as The Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels had plainly recognized a few minutes earlier.

I normally cover the crime beat and all that that entails: attending numerous court hearings, going to murder scenes and interviewing people while standing behind yellow crime tape. Although politics seemed like another world to me, I worked on Saturdays and sometimes I had to cover events like this one.

Bartels, the newspaper’s political reporter, wove her way through the crowd and found me as I was wandering around the cavernous lumber warehouse.

She graciously began introducing me to several people including Congressman Mike Coffman and some Colorado businessmen who were movers and shakers in the Republican party. She seemed to know half the people in the crowd.

But then she scrambled back to her laptop to tap out a blog describing the scene and I had inched my way up to the front of the crowd so I could be in a good spot for the speech.

While I was fumbling with my cellular phone – rehearsing how to record the press conference – the silver-haired gentleman spoke to me in a rather abrupt way.

“So could you just tell me, who is going to turn out the lights when the last reporter leaves The Denver Post?”

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.